So, I am writing a paper on how you know you (or someone else) is a “real” programmer. That is, they don’t fit in that “new user” box any more. But how do you make that decision?<\/p>\n
Is it like pornography, you just know it when you look at it? (Not that I ever personally looked at any of course, but I have heard you can find it on the Internet if you try really hard.)<\/p>\n
Yesterday, Rob Meekings made a comment about design decisions. That is certainly a distinction, when you get to the point that you are actually thinking that way. For example, I often will merge everything together in one long dataset, a habit that makes those who love SQL and the star schema just cringe. The REASON I do this is that most of the people I work with are researchers using very powerful computers with datasets of a few thousand observations, or, at most, a few hundred thousand. Even on a desktop, an analysis with SAS, Stata or SPSS takes seconds. It isn’t worth taking an extra hour or two to make a program run in one second instead of two. It also may make the program more difficult for the user to maintain him\/herself.<\/p>\n
HOWEVER, when I am running a program that runs against a 100GB dataset and can take hours to run because the researcher cannot use a supercomputer, e.g., due to security classification, I’ll spend a good bit of time trying to make it run as efficiently as possible. <\/p>\n
If there isn’t a pressing reason not to do it, I’d recommend someone with a large dataset considering running it on a cluster and take advantage of parallel processing capabilities. This means changing your code slightly to run on a different OS, often Linux or some other Unix version.<\/p>\n
I do a lot of “throw away programming”, that’s not to say it’s garbage. Sometimes I think my work is quite good, in fact, but it’s not production code that runs every day to produce reports on 500 different stores. When I DO write production code, I do several things differently. One is that I make good use of %include statements. For example, if there is a footnote that is going to be in every single output that says, “Funding provided by National Science Foundation Rural Systemic Initiative Grant #1234-2010” and several more lines about the university, address for contact, etc., I am going to have a small file that I just include. Yes, I could copy and paste it or have that as a template for when I create a new program. BUT what happens when we get another grant and we want to recognize both funding agencies in everything we publish? <\/p>\n
My point, and you may be surprised by this point to find that I do, in fact, have one, is that a distinction between novice and non-novice programmers is that they have the luxury of thinking about a design because they know more than one way to do something.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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